Sunday, July 13, 2008

In my continuing effort to catch up with last week's happenings, here's another post regarding the Visual Web conference in London, July 9 & 10.

As the "token Americans" at the conference, my fellow Tandemite and I had a unique opportunity to see how the British and European communities are approaching virtual worlds and serious games. It also made me think about how the products we are developing are not really "American"--their uses are really global. Many people asked if we were opening a London office (answer: not YET) and if we were interested in selling in the UK and EU (answer: yes). Although its not particularly an issue for our initial demos, I think we have to have in our minds that virtual worlds open up opportunities to reach people across the world and that our customers shouldn't be limited by oceans.

As exciting and encouraging as the conversations were at the conference of the opportunities overseas, I have to keep reminding myself that we need to take baby steps as we get out of the gate. Step 1: finish our demos. Step 2: sell our products to our first customer.

So, does it matter if our first customer is overseas? Not at all. I'm looking forward to seeing how our vision of training in this space can be adapted for and adopted by our overseas friends.